The Banality of Love

By Wendy Steiner;

Published: September 24, 1995

SHE was 18; he was 35. She was a Jew in Germany in the 1920's; he would become a Nazi. She showed him, in Elzbieta Ettinger's heated prose, "how to love ardently and not feel it a sin"; he showed her his mind -- the mind of a philosopher whom she would later call "the uncrowned king of the empire of thought." She was Hannah Arendt and he was Martin Heidegger, and the story of what she called their "star-crossed" love is as appalling as any that Shakespeare ever recounted.

In "Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger," Ms. Ettinger, a professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has reconstructed this tortured history from the letters the two philosopher-lovers exchanged over half a century. Their acquaintance began in 1924 as a classic professor-student affair, with Heidegger thrilled by the sex and secrecy of the liaison and Arendt overwhelmed by the honor of his desiring to befriend and teach her outside of class. Though Arendt became a world-famous philosopher and managed her life with great independence, her relationship to Heidegger was premised from start to finish on this master-student inequality.

Ms. Ettinger compresses their complex relationship into a cryptic and judgmental account. Four years after Heidegger first lured Arendt in, he decided that she should leave Marburg and him. When she complied, vowing never again to love a man, he began writing her lyrical letters "bordering on kitsch, the lines trembling with passion." He suggested that she could marry another man but still love him, described his desire for her but forbade her to answer unless he specifically asked for a response, neglected to correspond for long periods and then wrote love poems to her. When another, more docile woman took his fancy, he recycled some of these phrases, and after 1950 he insisted that Arendt and his wife, Elfride, shake hands and call each other "du."

By the early 1930's, Arendt knew that Heidegger was a Nazi, and when he became rector -- Fuhrer -- of the University of Freiburg in 1933, he had ample opportunity to act on his beliefs. He blocked the promotions and ended the careers of many of his colleagues suspected of being anti-Nazi, among them Karl Jaspers, Eduard Baumgarten and Max Mueller. He personally signed the document dismissing his old teacher, the Jewish Edmund Husserl, an act that Arendt felt hastened Husserl's death. As a result, she considered Heidegger "a potential murderer." Compounding these actions was a callousness that was almost as chilling. When Jaspers confided that his Jewish wife had cried at newspaper reports of anti-Semitism, Heidegger answered that "it makes one feel better to cry sometimes."

After the war, when Heidegger was banned from teaching and publishing for five years, he presented himself as an innocent victim of Nazism. According to Ms. Ettinger, Arendt believed him and Jaspers did not; yet both suffered from double-think where he was concerned. Ms. Ettinger says that the notes Jaspers "wrote to himself about Heidegger for almost the rest of his life . . . show a man torn between his desire to be close to Heidegger again and his overwhelming need to remain faithful to his principles."

Likewise, all the while Arendt was promoting Heidegger's writings and whitewashing his reputation, she was working for the Commission on Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and writing the much-proclaimed "Origins of Totalitarianism." She hid her growing honors from her old lover, though, because "he finds unbearable that my name appears in public, that I write books, etc. Always, I have been virtually lying to him about myself, pretending the books, the name, did not exist, and I couldn't, so to speak, count to three, unless it concerned the interpretations of his works."

Ms. Ettinger is appalled that this brilliant woman allowed herself to be so compromised. Of course, Arendt was very young when she first fell in love with Heidegger, and had no defenses against the "fox," as she called him. Moreover, everyone else seems to have been equally susceptible to his spell. The "little magician from Messkirch" was the most popular professor at Marburg, with a "mesmerizing delivery." Ms. Ettinger claims that Heidegger simply transferred "the cult of worship from the lecture hall to his personal relationship with Arendt," and despite her acuity, she embraced the most extraordinary contradictions in his name.

The "king of the empire of thought" was not responsible, she decided, for his Nazi actions; he had simply fallen under the influence of his despicable wife. And Arendt's passion was not dimmed, though she realized that Heidegger regarded her help and her love as "a privilege he accorded her," hiding his Nazi acts behind her good name and accepting her view of him as "a supreme being in a world drowning in mediocrity." What combination could be more durable than a totally self-absorbed man and a woman who needed to think well of him for the sake of her own self-respect?

THIS is the judgment to which Ms. Ettinger leads us in her short, bitter account. We might wish for a more sweeping critique, however, of the idea of genius, a notion central to Arendt's thinking. She explained Heidegger's Nazism as merely a "deformation professionnelle" common to most great thinkers: "It finally does not matter where the storms of their centuries carried these few. For the storm that blows through Heidegger's thinking . . . comes from the primeval, and what it leaves behind is something perfect that, like all that is perfect, returns home to the primeval." In such a view, genius excuses everything -- male chauvinism, hypocrisy, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism. Since the separation of intellect from responsibility has recently had a sinister history, one might read the love story of Arendt and Heidegger as a warning about the dangers of elevating men into gods.

But Ms. Ettinger does not follow out the implications of this history, nor does she shed much light on the feelings of her heroine. It is hard to imagine Arendt without Heidegger, or to believe that she would have been better off had she never known him. Thirty-four years after meeting him, she still claimed that her work "evolved directly from the first Marburg days and it owes you just about everything in every regard." She imagined dedicating "The Human Condition" (1958) to "my trusted friend, to whom I remained faithful and unfaithful, and both in love." If there is an object lesson in Arendt and Heidegger's love, it might be not only that the worship of genius is dangerous but that even the most all-encompassing passion, looked at from the outside, seems like folly.

Wendy Steiner's most recent book, "The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism," will be published later this year.